surrounding

sur·round

1. To extend on all sides of simultaneously; encircle: the magnetic field that surrounds the earth.

2. To enclose or confine on all sides so as to bar escape or outside communication: The police surrounded the house.

n.

1. Something, such as fencing or a border, that surrounds: a fireplace surround.

2.

a. The area around a thing or place: inflammation extending to the surround of the eye.

b. often surrounds Surroundings; environment: "It was the country, the flat agricultural surround, that so ravished me"(Listener).

3. A method of hunting wild animals by surrounding them and driving them to a place from which they cannot escape.

[Middle English surrounden, to inundate, from Old French suronder, from Late Latin superundāre : Latin super-, super- + Latin undāre, to rise in waves (from unda, wave; see wed- in Indo-European roots).]

A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.

How he would figure among them in the churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.

When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it.

Just at this time the mayor was boasting that he had put an end to gambling and prize fighting in the city; but here a swarm of professional gamblers had leagued themselves with the police to fleece the strikebreakers; and any night, in the big open space in front of Brown's, one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories.

He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

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